Congratulations! This is exciting stuff. I enjoyed reading Smashing Mag's writeup – their new site feels fast, and seeing their integrations with GoCommerce and Algolia makes static hosting much more compelling.

Do you have plans to extend this to a “batteries included” platform? At the moment it's one piece of a puzzle; users must still choose and configure their build and deployment pipeline, which puts it out of reach for less technical users.

To make static site hosting appealing to a wider audience it feels like a click-and-go platform with themes/plugins may be a good direction to follow. I have used https://www.siteleaf.com/ in the past and been impressed with the workflow. I'd love to help contribute to an open version that appealed to a wider non-technical audience.

We do really want to build a viable workflow around this stack, and get to a point where setting up a project like this is completely click-and-go - without giving up the fundamental basis of being open-source, based on open-standards and based on an open concept of the web!

Wordpress and the whole ecosystem around the LAMP stack did a great job around this and was a big player in building an open web, but the underlying tech stack is way outdated now, and the developer experience is so far off what modern front-end tooling is evolving into, so we aim to build something for a modern stack, that doesn't give up on the fundamental openness of an open-source ecosystem.

This is so close for what I am want. However, why are you using Liquid block elements

    {% section %} 

And not something more writer friendly and MarkDown-style such as CommonMark's container blocks

    ::: section

This builds on the commonly used pattern of code blocks that markdown writers know and editing apps will hopefully eventually directly support

http://spec.commonmark.org/0.26/#container-blocks-and-leaf-b...

There's a markdown-it plugin that implements container blocks as described:

https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it-container

Not an official part of the spec, but certainly something this CMS could support since you'd just parse the markdown it saves with whatever parser you choose with your static generator.

I'm not sure where you're getting that `::: section` syntax from. It doesn't appear anywhere in the CommonMark spec. Container blocks in Markdown are just things like blockquotes and list items...

Look like you are correct.

I had thought the `::: section` syntax was a recommended approach (if not yet part of the formal spec).

In the past, I have used various home grown solutions to this, but recently I have been using markdown-it and the accompanying plying markdown-it-container. On the CommonMark forums, I see that the ::: syntax is a leading contender, but that CommonMark itself will not address extensions to basic markdown until after the spec reaches 1.0

https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it-container

Haven't had a chance to fully try this out but am curious if it's possible to take advantage of Hugo shortcodes through the CMS admin?

There's no built-in support for Hugo shortcodes that I'm aware of, but you can enter them into posts fine, as there's built-in support for arbitrary Markdown content. Depending on your use case, it might be possible to extend the editor with a new widget to do what you want, as well [0]. Feel free to start an issue at https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/ if you're interested further.

[0]: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/blob/master/docs/exte...

Very minor fix, but you might want to fix your menu links in your template to have the forward slash at the end. It's causing a 301 which adds an unnecessary few ms to your load time.

Otherwise this is a really nice CMS & first time I've seen Netlify. I'm recommending we take a look at this as a possible solution to a writer's first & headless/decoupled CMS for our company. It was very easy to add a new content type. I think our non-developers could even do it fairly easily. I also really like your affordable options for hosting, especially the free open source stuff with a custom domain name & HTTPS. I will for sure give that a test run with some stuff.

This is an excellent project, thank you so much.

Is it possible to parse and edit embeds put into the articles via custom widgets? I see in the example how to add a widget to add something to my page. But I don't see how to parse markdown to present an editing to an 'old' widget. I also see that images are non-editable (both image file and alt) once placed into the article.

Is this is a hard limitation or rather widgets are half-baked?

You can definitely to parse and edit from custom widgets. Take a look at the documentation here: https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/extending/

The "fromBlock" property is what detects the insertion from the markdown to present back the widget interface when editing.

We have pretty big plans for the markdown editing component. It currently has a system of "editorComponents" that lets you define block level components that can be edited inside markdown bodies.

There's still some work ahead to make this really smooth, but the idea is to give simple ways to work with shortcodes, etc, without having to be aware of the syntax.

I planned on building something just like this for my current project, UI wise something like the Delve blog editor but for Markdown with Hugo shortcode support